"You are the salt of the earth!"

In Matthew 5:13, Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.”

 

All my Christian life as I have read these words of Jesus, I have always thought that the way we would lose our “saltiness” or our evangelistic influence in society would be to become so weak in our faith and practice that we would walk away from Christ and disappear into the sinful world.  However, there are other ways that we, the Church, can lose our ability to influence the world for Christ.  Losing our saltiness is done primarily when we start believing, talking and acting like the world and no longer like Jesus.  

 

I have been intrigued by the Christian Church in Nazi Germany and always wondered how was it possible to embrace Adolf Hitler and his ungodly self-promoting schemes to rule the world.  It happened through, as all things do, a process.  Germany had lost World War I and were forced to pay very expensive reparations for their war crimes.  After the shame of the war the German Church were now mixing their thinking with Christian thought and Nazi thought.  They were embarrassed by their nation’s failure in the war as much as the non-Christian culture. There came a mixture of thought in the church which included both Christian doctrine and politics.  The line blurred between loyalty to Christ and loyalty to National interests. Then, when Hitler rose to power there were concerns at first but then the 1920 Nazi Party platform put them at peace.  This is the part of that platform that brought about an embracing of the Nazi system by the Church both Catholic and Protestant:

"We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The Party as such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without tying itself confessionally to any one confession. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved from within on the basis of the common good before individual good."

 

The statement that bought the loyalty of most of the church was the first, “we demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state…”.   Remember, these were the words of Adolf Hitler and his regime.  But in accepting that statement the Church also embraced the statement about “combating the Jewish materialistic spirit at home and abroad…” resulting in time of the murder of over 6,000,000 Jews.

 

Certainly, there were parts of the church in Germany that resisted selling out to the Nazi political system.  The most famous resistance came from the protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed for his actions against Hitler.  But by in large, the church cooperated and even gladly aligned itself with the political movement at the sacrifice of their Christian influence.  They lost their “saltiness” and would never regain it as they had known it during earlier times. 

 

 

 

This picture should bring concern to all believers.  As the Church of Jesus Christ living among society, we must not lose our influence upon a lost world.  They must not see us and our Mission as the same as a political mission.  The unbelieving world will always disdain us as followers of Jesus but that will never rob us of our spiritual influence. Our faithfulness to God during difficulty actually strengthens our influence.  We lose our “saltiness” when the world sees us aligned with political systems above our Christian convictions.  The earth is stained with the blood of Christian martyrs that would not look the other way and compromise their Faith for expediency. May God give us wisdom and discernment and great courage as we walk in these very stressful end times.  Our world needs more salt!